I’m stuck in bed with a nasty cold, and I’m bored. Tell me the story of how you met that important person in your life. Doesn’t have to be a significant other - could be the story of how you met your best friend, or someone who was very influential in your life.

I met Boyjangles when we were 15, because he was seated in front of me in sophomore year english class. He says we met earlier than that because we were apparently in the same Spanish class for the last couple months of freshman year (he transferred from to our school) but I have no memory of this. However, we did not become friends in class. Also, at no point was I attracted to him. This may have had something to do with the fact that he was probably 4 inches shorter than me, weighed about 110 pounds, and had frosted tips (oh, the late 90s). But he was on the tennis team with one of my good friends later that spring, and he got drawn into our friend group. After that we were a group of 4 girls and 2 boys who did everything together (think the crew from Friends, which we so very much aspired to be). I imagine we were super annoying to people around us.

But, despite spending umpteen hours with Boyjangles, I didn’t particularly care for him. He was kind of rude/blunt, and not particularly considerate of others, and I disliked that his personality seemed to change a lot based on who he was with (later I learned that this was a coping skill developed from moving every few years during his childhood). I was probably equally unappealing to him in my own ways - opinionated and sarcastic and probably other things he’s too nice to tell me.

But then Boyjangles and I ended up choosing the same college. It was there that I spent more one-on-one time with him, and some combination of growing up and not having enough friends to be choosy about who I spent time with made me realize that we had a lot more in common than I previously thought. So then we became truly good friends. But we dated other people, and there was still no romantic interest. Until junior year when, after a year apart due to study abroad, I went to visit him in Barcelona. And suddenly he was hot and worldly and fun, and Barcelona is a very romantic city. Let’s just say that was an amazing week, but we were also terrified that we were torpedoing our friendship. His favorite memory of that week is kissing me goodbye at the bus stop, and me saying “What have we done?” and then catapulting on to the bus, my bags all akimbo and coins flying everywhere (my habit of inelegantly flailing through life is a long standing joke between us). But 14 years later it appears to have worked out.